Thus Spinoza replied to his angry correspondent, so he spoke on every occasion, and sometimes even without any provocation and in his writings. In the Ethics, he promised to treat God, the mind, and human passions as if they were planes and triangles, and he made a solemn vow to eradicate from his philosophical vocabulary all words that in any way resembled human desires, searches, and struggles. Neither evil nor good, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad, he says, will influence his method of searching for truth. Man is a link or one of infinitely many links in a single infinite whole, which he called now God, now nature, now substance. The task of philosophy, on the other hand, is to "understand" the complex and intricate mechanism by virtue of which an infinite number of separate parts form a single and self-sufficient whole. He did not abolish the word "God" and even (in the same letter to his angry correspondent) emphasized that in his philosophy God was given the same honorable place as in other philosophies: the truthful Spinoza did not disdain this lie either.

To this circumstance I pay special attention, for, after Spinoza, who took upon himself the full burden of responsibility for the first time in modern history the glorified lie, this kind of pretense was almost elevated to a philosophical virtue. And it is clear to the blind that the equation – God, nature, substance – meant that God could not and should not be given a place in philosophy. In other words: when you are looking for the ultimate Truth, you have to go after it in the same way that mathematicians go when they solve their problems. When we ask what the sum of the angles in a triangle is, do we expect that the one who gives us the answer to our question has the freedom to answer us in one way or another, i.e., has the property by which we distinguish a living being from a non-living being, animate from inanimate? That is why mathematics is distinguished by such seductive precision and solidity, and by the universality and binding nature of its judgments connected with this, that it has renounced everything human, that it wants neither ridere nor detestari, that it needs only what Spinoza calls intelligere.

And since philosophy wants the same solidity and universal obligation for itself, it has no other way out. It must strive only for intelligere, and reject everything that does not fit into the intelligere as non-existent and illusory. And we already know what Spinoza's intelligere means. Intelligere means to imagine the world as an infinite number of particles (Leibniz later called monads) moving according to the rules that have existed for centuries, having neither the possibility nor the right to change anything without them, and not at all the established order for them. And God, in this sense, is no different from people. And his "freedom" lies only in submission to the order, which, in the end, expresses his being. Deus ex solis suæ naturæ legibus, et a nemine coactus agit. [2]

That is why, already in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza raises and without any apparent hesitation resolves the question of the meaning and significance of the Bible and the God of the Bible. In the Bible, he tells us, there is no Truth, and the Bible has no place for Truth. There is only moral instruction in the Bible. We can accept this from the Bible, but we need to go to another place for the Truth. Yes. The Bible does not claim to be the Truth, and what it tells does not look like the Truth at all. God did not create the world in six days. God never blessed man, did not reveal Himself to Moses at Sinai, did not lead the Jews out of Egypt, etc. All these are only poetic images, i.e., fiction that a reasonable person interprets in a conditional and limited sense. And the God about whom so much is told in the Bible does not exist and never existed – this is again evidenced by reason, i.e. the Something that peremptorily solves mathematical problems and in mathematics teaches man to separate truth from falsehood. And finally, and this was perhaps of particular importance for the future, not only is there no God of the Bible, but there is no need for him. For people, the essential thing is not whether there is a God, but whether it is possible to preserve the fullness of piety, to which those who have been brought up in the course of centuries who have been brought up on the Holy Scriptures. The peoples of the Scriptures. Spinoza, who believes in the infallibility of reason, meekly submits to this decision of his. Yes, God can and must be rejected, but piety and religiosity must be preserved. And if this is so, it follows that the concepts of "substance" or "nature," concepts that do not offend the mind of a person brought up in mathematics, perfectly replace the idea of God, which has become unacceptable to everyone.

Spinoza's formula – deus-natura-substantia – like all the conclusions drawn from it in the Ethics and in the works that preceded the Ethics, only means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza became the starting point for reflection on the philosophy of modern times. No matter how much we talk about God now, we know for sure that we are not talking about the God who lived in biblical times, who created heaven and earth and man in His own image and likeness, who loves, and wants, and worries, and repents, and argues with man, and sometimes even yields to man in dispute. Reason, the same reason which has power over triangles and perpendiculars, and which therefore believes that it has the sovereign right to distinguish truth from falsehood, a reason which seeks not a better philosophy but a true one, this reason, with its characteristic self-assurance and unobjectionable tone, declares that such a God would not be an all-perfect and even merely perfect being, and therefore therefore, he is not God at all. Anyone who refuses to accept the decision of reason will inevitably face the fate of Thales: he will fall into the well and all earthly joys will become inaccessible to him.

III

This is what the truthful Spinoza taught us. He found the last judge over the living and the dead, bowed down before him and bequeathed to us that the highest, final wisdom is in obedience to this judge, by whose weak-willed will the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to two right angles, and everything that happens in life is accomplished...

And, contrary to what historians of philosophy may say, Spinoza's successors have not yet been able to break free from the power of the ideas he proclaimed. Neither the "criticism" of Kant, nor the "dynamism" of Hegel, nor the scientism of Fichte, nor the attempts of Leibniz and Schelling, nor even the latest philosophical criticism have been able to step over the line of the circle outlined by Spinoza. Much has been said about Spinoza's rationalism, and much has been made to oppose his "reason" to our "experience," but all this has led to nothing and could not lead to anything. For no one dared to touch Spinoza's fundamental thesis. Everyone after him is convinced that when we need the truth, we must go for it to the same "unrighteous" judge from whom we learned that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. Everyone believes that there is no other "righteous" judge and there cannot be, and also that Spinoza himself went to the unjust judge for all his truths and obediently, even joyfully, submitted to his sentences. Obedience on earth has always been considered the highest virtue, for only if all people agree to submit to one principle can that "harmony" be realized, which is also considered the highest ideal of achievement. No philosopher would have dared to say what the frivolous Susanna said to Figaro, who was in love with her, that her caprice, the caprice of a living being, stands above inanimate norms and laws. After all, Susanna had conquered Figaro before, and then argued with him. Philosophers, on the other hand, have to appeal to listeners who are completely indifferent to them, and who will never submit unless they are forced to obey by force, whether by physical force or by the force of dialectics.

And so, we are witnessing an amazing phenomenon. Philosophers, i.e., men to whom truth is most dear, and who ought to be truthful par excellence, are found to be less truthful than ignorant women. The Thracian woman laughed, looking at Thales floundering in the well, Susanna frankly said that for her caprice was the only source of truth. Have you ever heard anything like this from the lips of representatives of wisdom? Even the sophists, who seem to be brave men, who have so compromised themselves by their boldness before the judgment of history, have never allowed themselves to be so truthful. They "argued" with Socrates: they wanted Socrates and all other people to recognize their truth, i.e., to agree that their assertions were not the expression of their "accidental" desires and aspirations, but something that they had received from the same thing, which stood above men and gods, but had nothing human in it, not even one of the signs of an animate principle. For on this, and only on this, Socrates caught them in his dialectical nets, if only what Plato tells us about Socrates' disputes with the Sophists corresponds to historical reality. For if the sophists, like the merry Thracian woman or the careless Susanna, had answered all the objections presented to them with laughter, or had refused to argue because they were useless or out of contempt for universally binding truths, Socrates, invincible in disputes, would have been completely disarmed. But, apparently, the sophists also believed in the sovereign right of reason to decree universally binding truths, or, if they did not believe, then. Fate did not want to preserve in history traces of such an unusual daring for mortals. This is quite acceptable; We know very well that the gods are envious and jealously guard the deepest secrets from the eyes of men.

In any case, the history of philosophy testifies to us that for man the search for truth has always been the pursuit of universally binding judgments. It was not enough for a person to possess the truth. He wanted something different, as it seemed to him, "better": so that his truth would be the truth "for everyone." In order to have the right to do so, he has created the fiction that he does not create his own truth, but takes it ready-made, and not from a being like himself, i.e., from a living being, that is, first of all, a living being, that is, first of all, inconstant, changeable, capricious, but from the hands of something that does not know change and does not want change, because it does not want anything at all and does not care about itself. to no one else: from the hands of that which teaches us that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. Accordingly, since truth has its source in such a special and necessarily inanimate being, human virtue is reduced entirely to self-denial, to self-denial. Impersonal and impartial truth on the one hand, and readiness to sacrifice everything to such truth on the other, this was the primum movens of ancient philosophy. In the Middle Ages, even earlier, almost from the beginning of our era, philosophers and theologians, inspired by the Bible, made attempts to combat the "wisdom" bequeathed by the Hellenes. But, in general, they were unsuccessful and doomed to failure in advance. Several decades before the Bible was revealed to the peoples of Europe, Philo of Judaea had already begun to work for the "reconciliation" of Eastern revelation with Western science. But what he called reconciliation was a betrayal. Some Church Fathers, like Tertullian, for example, were aware of this. But not everyone, like Tertullian, was able to see what the essence of the Hellenic spirit was and the danger of its influence. He alone understood that Athens, as he expressed it, would never come to terms with Jerusalem. He is the only one, and also only once, in the famous saying, which I have already quoted more than once, and which, in my opinion, as I have already pointed out, each of us should repeat every day when going to bed and rising from sleep, has ventured to recognize the incantatory formula which alone can give us freedom from age-old delusion. Non pudet quia pudendum est, prorsus credibile est quia ineptum, certum quia impossibile. Such was the novum organum with which Tertullian tried to approach the Eternal Book. Only once, once in the two thousand years that have passed since the Western peoples began to read the Bible, it occurred to one man that the pudet, ineptum, impossibile, glorified by reason, were robbing us of what was most necessary and most precious. No one heard Tertullian, he did not even hear himself. His words are either completely forgotten, or if they are sometimes quoted by secular or ecclesiastical writers, it is only as an example of extreme nonsense and tactlessness. Everyone considers it their duty not only to reconcile Athens with Jerusalem, but to demand that Jerusalem go to Athens for justification and blessing. Philo's thought even penetrated into the Holy Scriptures. The Scriptures colored the fourth Gospel. In the beginning there was a word that meant: first there was Athens, and then Jerusalem. And, therefore, everything that came from Jerusalem must be weighed on the Athenian scales. The God of the Bible, since he did not conform to the Hellenic concept of an all-perfect being, had to agree to change his "nature." First of all, he had to renounce "image and likeness," for, as the Greeks knew for sure, the most perfect being was not supposed to have any image and no likeness: least of all the image and likeness of man...

Thus, the ontological proof of the existence of God, which still seduces many today (although Kant rejected it, while Hegel convinced us that we must return to it) means nothing more than a readiness to surrender Jerusalem to the judgment of Athens. The idea of an all-perfect being was created in Athens, and the God of the Bible, in order to acquire the predicate of being, had to follow him with a prostration to Athens, where all the predicates were forged and distributed, which cannot exist without general recognition. No "reasonable" person will agree to admit that God can obtain for himself the predicates he needs according to Tertullian's novum organum — non pudet quia pudendum est and certum quia impossibile. And this applies not only to our contemporaries or to the ancients: it must not be forgotten that the "religiously" minded in Aristotle the præcursor Christi in naturalibus, and thought to themselves that Philosophus was also the forerunner of Christ in supernaturalibus. [5]

This ancient idea, which did not die even in the "dark era" of the Middle Ages, received its full expression in modern times in the philosophy of Spinoza. Now it has so taken hold of the minds of people that no one living today even suspects that the truthful Spinoza was not at all as truthful as it is commonly believed. He spoke, and often said, not at all what he thought. It is not true that he did not consider his philosophy to be the best, but only the true one. It is also not true that when he created it, he did not cry, laugh, or curse, but only listened to what reason told him, that is, that indifferent to everything, because he is not alive, judge, who proclaimed that the sum of the angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. If you do not believe me, read the "Tractatus de emendatione intellectus" or at least the introductory words to this treatise. Then you will know that Spinoza, like Thales, fell into the abyss, and that from the depths of the abyss he cried out to the Lord. It is also not true that he treated of God, of the mind, of human passions, as one treats of lines and planes, and that he, like the judge whom he imposed on men, was indifferent to good and evil, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and only sought "understanding." The mathematical robes in which he clothed his thought were "rented" by him in order to give more heaviness to his exposition, for people are so willing to identify heaviness with significance. But try to "tear apart" them, and you will see how little the real Spinoza resembles the one that history has preserved for us. He did not consider his philosophy, I repeat, to be the truest, but the best, contrary to what he so categorically stated to his correspondent. He himself admitted it at the end of the ethics: "omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt," he said. He was not looking for verum, but for optimum, and he, the truthful Spinoza, told people the lie that he who decides that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles is given the right to solve all the questions that arise in the rebellious and yearning human soul. How it happened that the truthful Spinoza proclaimed such an ugly lie all his life, I speak of this elsewhere. Here I will only say once again that this lie was accepted by the people of modern times as the only possible higher truth. Spinoza seemed not only a sage, but also a saint. For us, he was the only sober among the drunk, as Anaxagoras once was for Aristotle. And he was also canonized as a saint – remember at least the enthusiastic words of Schleiermacher: "opfert mit mir ehrerbietig den Manen des heiligen verstossenen Spinoza",[7] and so on.

IV

The truthful Spinoza, with hitherto unheard-of power and inspiration, announced lies to people. The truth is, as I have already pointed out, that this lie was not invented by him. It has been living in the world since human thought began to strive for the domination of "knowledge" over life. If you believe the textbooks of philosophy, this happened in Europe six centuries before our era and the father of this lie was Thales. According to the Bible, this happened much earlier, when there were only two people on earth, and the father of this lie was not a man, but the devil who took the form of a serpent. We don't believe the Bible; Spinoza revealed to us that in the Bible you can find high morality that is still good for us, but you need to go to other places for the truth. But one way or another, whether it comes from Thales or from the devil, the fact remains unchanged: people are deeply convinced, people consider it a self-evident truth, that they are in the power of some eternally existing, incorporeal and indifferent force, which is given to decide and what the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to, and what fate awaits man, nations and even the universe. Or, as the same Spinoza put it, with his characteristic mysterious and sinister calmness: the mind and will of God has as much in common with the mind and will of man as the constellation of the Dog with the dog barking as an animal. Any attempt to break free from the power of a conviction that has been created over the centuries is shattered by a whole series of pre-prepared, also "self-evident" and insurmountable in their self-evidence pudet, ineptum, impossibile.